Greedy Goblin

Monday, January 12, 2015

Blizzard caught lying

"Mythic is a different concept from all other difficulties and it's not meant to be PUG friendly.
Not enabling cross-realm mythic is a design decision. Enabling this option would imply that this content should be doable by PUGs, and because it clearly isn't, it would only lead to frustration, complaints and nerf requests. ... Also, we're likely going to enable cross-realm mythic Highmaul when the next tier arrives."

The first section of the statement can be a honest mistake. The first section clearly assumes that PUGs are inferior to guild groups. It's an acceptable mistake that Blizzard didn't know that PuGs are better than 80% of the heroic raiding guilds. And most guilds are leveling-casual guilds. This can come from honest - though misunderstood - data analysis: they see for example that 95% of the PuGs fail to do HC Ko'ragh, while 70% of the guild groups succeed, and conclude that PuGs are worse. However it's a mistake, because PuGs are much less stable than a guild group. It's usual that a guild group wipes 100 times in the same raid lockout, same players over multiple days. No PuG ever lived that long. However its members reform into another PuG and try again. The proper metric would be "how many wipes does a pugger player need to kill the boss vs a guild group player". The truth is that you can progress faster in PuGs than in most guilds, therefore if Mythic is doable by guilds, it's doable by PuGs.

However the second part of the statement proves that no honest mistake was made, Blizzard is lying. Since the new Heroic Blackrock Foundry will provide ilvl 680 gear, it will be much preferred gearing path over the harder Highmaul Mythic. So PuGs will have much smaller player pool, so PuGging Highmaul Mythic would be harder than now (assuming it was technically possible). So if their logic was "Highmaul Mythic is too hard for PuGs, save them from frustration" they shouldn't revert it when it becomes harder.

The truth is that Blizzard knows that PuGs are more successful than most guilds. If you aren't in a world top 5000 guild, you should abandon your guild and PuG. Blizzard wanted to preserve the failguilds (all below world top 5000) by banning PuGs from Mythic. When I killed 7/7HC, only 4900 guilds were more progressed than me. Currently 6500 guilds have a Mythic Kargath kill, something I cannot even try to have. So Blizzard says "if you keep boosting your useless guildmates, you'll eventually have Mythic loot". Mythic Highmaul will open for me when it will be irrelevant. Blizzard simply gave 2 months advantage to guilds over PuGs to help them stay competitive.

Another commenter found a different error in the lie: if PuGs are too bad to enter Mythic, why can same-realm PuGs enter, when they are equally PuGs.

I'm canceling my subscription and copied this post to the forum topic.

PS: CCP makes many fails. But I've never seen them being malicious and manipulative against me. I focus all my efforts on EVE. Bad news for CFC I guess. Talking about CFC: an anti-tanked covops hauler has about 2500 armor EHP. If one increases it by 60%, those irrelevant pirate scum can't stop it.

39 comments:

The reason is - "We want your moneyz for realm transfers". You want to find guild to raid content that matters - you forced to transfer if you cant find suitable on your realm.Also, for one PuG that make 7/7 hc there is like 99 that can't kill more then first three.

The truth is that you can progress faster in PuGs than in most guilds, therefore if Mythic is doable by guilds, it's doable by PuGs.

Then do it. What is stopping you?

The truth is that Blizzard knows that PuGs are more successful than most guilds.

You have submitted zero data to back up this assertion, likely because you know it's false. You were able to PuG it, along with X number of other players. That does not at all suggest that PuGs are more successful than guilds generally, because we have no idea A) how many PuGs fail, or even B) how many PuGs succeed.

In any case, there is no lie. The dev decision was very clearly expressed: if a Mythic option was enabled, "it would only lead to frustration, complaints and nerf requests." Everyone knows this would happen, including you. And since Blizzard does not want to suggest that Mythic should be PuG-able (not that it couldn't be), it is not included in cross-realm LFG until it is obsolete content.

You ascribe a conspiracy that doesn't exist, and makes no sense even if it did.

I was wondering when you would give up WoW again as a bad cause. I get suckered into it every so often but it always boils down to the same thing: no one I know plays and the people that do play tend to not be very mature.

Like Azuriel said above, the fact that you have successfully pugged doesn't mean pugs are successful in general. Blizzard have the actual stats, thousands of pugs could fail all day every day with groups like yours only surviving by kicking everyone that even makes tiny mistake out (which in itself causes complaints). Guilds persevere, they work with each other to improve until they can succeed. You boot people, restricting content to the players you kick until you can find a group that carries you through. All Blizzard are doing is shrinking the pool of people you'll be able to kick.

@Robert: actually it does. I made a clear and followable ruleset that guarantees progress. Anyone can follow it and succeed.

The "Guilds persevere, they work with each other to improve until they can succeed." is simply a double-standard. If a guild wipes hundred times, you call it "persevere", if PuGs wipe, you call it a failure.

That being said, I don't doubt that most PuGs fail. I'm just saying guilds fail too, otherwise I wouldn't have pugged 7/7 when only 4900 guilds (out of several hundred thousand) did it.

The "kicking players creates complaints" is true, but that's exactly what I'm saying: Blizzard punishes PuGs for not carrying morons and slackers.

Blizzard's approach is entirely focused on customer retention. They have a great deal of data telling them players who raid tend to stay subscribed much longer, and players in a stable raiding guild stay subscribed much longer. Therefore, you can see their focus. They want to push everyone into raiding, and into raiding guilds.

Of course, any idiot understands the relationship works the other way. The most hardcore players, who were always going to stay subscribed, are they one who join a hardcore guild and raid. Pushing a casual into a raiding guild will only burn him out and make him quit sooner.

I will be curious to see subscription numbers over the next 6 months. WoD is not turning out to be as different as I think a lot of people hoped. It is still "hit level cap and raid or do useless fluff, but we only really reward the raiding."

Finally: every single player in every single PuG has a guild tag. Why don't they raid with their guild? Because no matter how bad the PuG they are in, their guild is even worse.

exactly this!

But they won't switch the mhytic content to cross-realm. They make money by realmtransfers.the only way now is if the PUG people gather on one empty server via transfer or alt and PUG there. Until Blizzard flags mhytic guild-only.

"If a guild wipes hundred times, you call it "persevere", if PuGs wipe, you call it a failure."Not at all, I simply believe that considerably more PuG players fail than guild players. By their very nature, PuGs can't grow as a group because you never know who you'll get, so at best PuGs eliminate players until they by luck manage to put through a group which succeeds. Guilds focused on raiding on the other hand will eventually improve their players until they can complete it.

"The "kicking players creates complaints" is true, but that's exactly what I'm saying: Blizzard punishes PuGs for not carrying morons and slackers."You expect them to support that behavior? While you don't like the "M&S" (by the way, a couple of failures does not necessarily make someone M&S, you generally don't give them a chance - I'm sure you've made mistakes and not kicked yourself) you have to remember that Blizzards income primarily comes from those players. They've set up the ability to create PuGs so that players can randomly connect to groups and play some content. They set up guilds so you can kick people and build a successful team. So why would they support you using the PuGs as your own personal guild, wasting other players time when you kick them half way through because you decided they didn't do enough damage?

Gevlon, do you understand how the Mythic raid lockout structure is completely different from the normal and heroic structure?

Let's say you, Bob, and 18 other people PUG Mythic Kargath. You think "Great, we'll stop (because it took a few hours) here and I'll resume in a day or two." A few days later you assemble a group to work on Mythic Twins and zone in...only to find Bob (or any of the other 18 people) killed Twins and Brackenspore during the last few days.

So you can't do Twins and you can't do Brackenspore...and Tectus/Butcher are a hell of a lot harder.

Does this sound like a good environment for PUGs?

I mean, hell, if you make a PUG that is working on Twin Ogron, no one in that group can join a different group working on Twin Ogron the next day because the Mythic raid IDs are different.

And it's set up this way to prevent abusive/exploitative behavior by top guilds.

@Robert: if guilds keep improving, why are there so few successful guilds. What I see is they blame gear on fails and instead of improving, farm.

It's obvious that Blizzard expect us not kick failures. But this is the post about: they lie. Instead of saying "we want to give a huge advantage to guilds because they are good social environment and good for the player retention", they say "we give guilds a huge advantage because PuGs would only fail".

@Balkoth: the Mythic raid lockout system is arbitrary and made by Blizzard for the same reason: they want to lock people to guilds. There is absolutely no technical reason to not use the Normal-Heroic lockout system for Mythic. The "abusive-exploitative" behavior is simply competitive and essentially PuG-ging. If two guilds compete for World First, one can't just put out a twitter "we need a hunter for Brand ASAP, link Imperator try logs for inv" and poach a hunter from a World Top 10 (but not No1 competing) guild.

The point is that on EVERY difficulty level, PuGging is better than fixed guild group, because unless you claim that Method has the best 20 players in the World, they could improve by replacing their worst member to a better one. While topguilds can and do poach, this action needs serious commitment for both parties and serves as a barrier for poaching.

Why do you keep comparing yourself to all guilds? Most guilds do not have hardcore raiding as their purpose. There are other reasons for a guild to exist.

Blindly comparing PUGs to guilds misses the fact that they can and do serve different purposes. Just because Blizzard does not want to make the same dumb apples to oranges comparisons that you do does not make them liars.

"Finally: every single player in every single PuG has a guild tag. Why don't they raid with their guild? Because no matter how bad the PuG they are in, their guild is even worse."

Because their guild is not a raiding guild?Because their guild does not have enough people on at the moment?Because they do raid with their guilds and fancied doing some PuGging while not on a raid day?

"There is absolutely no technical reason to not use the Normal-Heroic lockout system for Mythic."

Yes, there is.

You see, the first week of heroic raids top guilds did something like the following:

25 actual raiders125 alts/friends/etc available.

Then do 6 individual heroic runs with 4-5 raiders and 20-21 alts/friends/etc in each run and funnel *all* of the loot to the raiders. The result is that each raider effectively gets 5-6 weeks of loot in a single week (since they get the loot designed for 5-6 people). They then combine the raiders into an actual progression group for Mythic.

But there's a reason there's a weekly lockout in the first place -- Blizzard wants gear progression over time to make the bosses easier, not for people to get all of their gear in a week or two. The Mythic lockout prevents this by making it so you can't do something like the split + combine -- at least, you can't without sacrificing an entire week of Mythic progression in essence.

That's the power of a raiding guild working together rather than a PUG with everyone else for itself. And Blizzard does not want them to be able to get that much gear from Mythic that fast.

Hence the lockout.

P.S. Also, did you read the Dungeons and Raids forum near the end of SoO? Every single day there was at least 4-5 threads by people complaining about the Mythic SoO lockout because they didn't understand how heroic lockouts work -- precisely to prevent guild abuse like this. I can only imagine what General Discussion was like -- or how many tickets Blizzard received claiming the person's lockout was bugged. That's likely part of it too, it simply caused a ton of confusion (which was reflected in-game as well in groups that I found).

You seriously think that the solution of "everything is personal loot" is a better situation than "Mythic lockouts are strict?"

I guarantee 90%+ of the raiders in the top 1%ish of WoW (aka the Mythic audience) would hate that change.

- it means you can't let a new recruit pick up the unneeded stuff when you've been farming 5/7M for a month or whatever- it means you can't funnel loot to someone who needed to class change- it means you have situations with wasted loot, where person A gets item X when he has item X and person B gets item Y when they have item Y and they can't swap- it means you can't give rare items to desired people, either in terms of which classes/specs benefit the most or in terms of the best players (or, hell, in terms of best attendance/seniority or whatever)- it eliminates being able to focus gear on people who need it the most -- we tend to focus our gear on the DPS, then tanks, then healers for progression. Why? Because DPS checks are a hell of a lot stricter than healing checks 99% of the time.- especially with all the warforged/socketed/etc stuff, you don't want someone happening to get two warforged weapons while another person just has a standard one (no trading involved, just flat out RNG, this is similar to an earlier point but more related to the warforged/socketed/etc stuff)

I could probably think of a few more reasons as well, that's off the top of my head. Guild leaders would loathe your proposed "solution."

"Instead of saying "we want to give a huge advantage to guilds because they are good social environment and good for the player retention", they say "we give guilds a huge advantage because PuGs would only fail"."You haven't yet shown that pugs wouldn't fail. All you've shown is that your pug, when booting members a lot, succeeded. If you played without kicking people like you do, then you would have failed, so with the design that pugs don't kick players the way you do in mind, blizzard is correct in stating that all pugs fail.

Prove them wrong. With a new character do the same but don't kick people.

@Balkoth - there's NO point for a guild like Method to "loot funnel" in Mythic. That would require them actually BEATING Mythic with 5 mains and 15 alts, multiple times in a single lockout, to funnel gear to their main 20man team, so they could go back in and ... beat Mythic.

@Balkoth: they have no reason to hate personal loot, because every other competitor has the same personal loot, so they are neither ahead, nor behind. Remember: everything that is possible is also mandatory if you are competitive. If you can loot funnel, you must loot funnel. One less "must" move.

You can decrease the RNG of "OMG fifth helm and no bracer" by making it possible to trade loot if you already have higher or same ilvl.

@Robert: that demand is bizarre. Successful guilds (those ahead of PuGs) have a very selective recruitment. They reject much more applicants than any PuG ever kicked.

"@Jim L: because Blizzard opened Mythic for all guilds! They can do so without lying only if all guilds are better than PuGs."

Come on. The premise does not lead to the conclusion. (1) Blizzard believes (rightly or wrongly) that some content can only be achieved via a dedicated group, not a PUG. So (2), Blizzard sets aside certain content for guilds only.

From this, you cannot deduce that Blizzard believes that all guilds are better than all PUGs, or frankly even that no PUG can possibly do Mythic. Just that they believe that trying to PUG Mythic content will result in enough frustration that it is not worth it to leave it as an option.

The only conclusion you can draw is Blizzard believes that some guilds are better than most PUGs. Which is not an outlandish belief.

@Gevlon: "only 4900 guilds were ahead of me when I did 7/7 HC, so 1/3 of these guilds that could enter are worse than PuGs."

This tells you nothing about which type of raiding grouping is better, only that your specific pug was better, but your specific pug does not necessarily represent the average pug, it could have been statistically speaking an exceptional group with above-than-average results.

Basically all you know is that some pugs can be better than some guilds, which is pretty obvious.

I must have missed the part where you talk about how it is impossible to create a PuG on your server. Have you even tried?

So 99% of the guilds are worse than where my PuG is.

Your PuG =! all PuGs, or even most of them. I'm still not sure why you are comparing all guilds against people specifically queueing for heroic PuGs (who can filter by ilevel). Shouldn't it be just those who are specifically raiding guilds?

If "it would only lead to frustration, complaints and nerf requests.", why let guilds go to Mythic. Most of them won't get further than 1/7HM. Won't they be frustrated?

No doubt. However the volume would be orders of magnitude higher, as evidenced by the current state of LFR.

As the Blizzard employee stated, having it open to PuGing via LFG creates an expectation that it's designed to be readily PuGable; why add it otherwise? Whether it can be is irrelevant.

@Azuriel: the purpose of PuGging is playing when you are available. The amount of people in a server is too low to provide 19 people ready when I am. This is why battlegrounds, LFG, LFR are all cross-realm.

So it's most probably impossible to fill a raid within a server from people who want to PuG.

There is no such thing as "my PuG". There is just PuG as people come and go randomly. As I can join any PuGs (so can you), I can join a good one. The fact that morons do start fail PuGs is irrelevant, as you can just quit after 1 pull.

If adding it to cross-realm makes people expect that it's easily PuGable, then adding it guild-available makes people expect that it's easily be done by a guild. Again, I don't see why would people approach the SAME content with different expectations.

@Gevlon: "If some PuGs are better than some guilds, then telling that some content is too hard for PuGs but OK for guilds is a lie."

No, it's not necessarily a lie. First of all you cannot extrapolate performance from lower difficulty tiers to Mythic: it might very well be that at higher difficulty pugs's performance takes a huge hit compared to guild raiding.

On top of that, Blizzard is most likely reasoning with statistics at hand: it's clear there will be exceptional pugs able to outclass raiding guilds, but it doesn't mean they are a high enough percentage of the pugging community to warrant opening Mythic difficulty to them.

Gevlon: "If adding it to cross-realm makes people expect that it's easily PuGable, then adding it guild-available makes people expect that it's easily be done by a guild. Again, I don't see why would people approach the SAME content with different expectations."

That's only true if you assume most players would evaluate the situation rationally. I dare say that most hardcore raiding guilds would do that, but the vast majority of players would not, and the vast majority of players are likely to be puggers in the first place.

Have you ever considered that, Pugging the way you do, you are actually spending more time raiding than most guilds? While Progression/Raiding Week is a valid metric, I think that Progression/Toral Hours Raiding is even more valuable. I highly doubt you did anything close to 6 raiding hours in a week to get to 7/7H, including the group forming time.

I started H-HM on New Year's Day. Seven hours /played to down Kargath through Twins.

Another four hours to get Ko'ragh.

And about nine hours to get Imperator.

That's 20 hours total raiding time, over two resets. Not much more time-per-week than what I put in when I was in a semi-casual raiding guild for Wrath & Cata, and I'm done far far earlier. With no drama.

You people are acting like someone that queues for LFR could randomly be routed into a Mythic PuG. What difference does it make if most will fail? Players have every right to fail repeatedly, with only a few successfully killing bosses.

"@Balkoth - there's NO point for a guild like Method to "loot funnel" in Mythic. That would require them actually BEATING Mythic with 5 mains and 15 alts, multiple times in a single lockout, to funnel gear to their main 20man team, so they could go back in and ... beat Mythic."

They would absolutely do it for the early bosses which are fairly easy -- stuff like Kargath and Twins, possibly Brackenspore.

Then bring those people for the harder bosses after that.

"You can decrease the RNG of "OMG fifth helm and no bracer" by making it possible to trade loot if you already have higher or same ilvl."

Except that doesn't fix the problem of the "new guy" on his first Mythic raid randomly getting that Warforged/Socketed weapon or trinket (he'll be lower ilvl so he can't trade) or the issue of something like a lower ilvl healer getting a weapon over a DPS (healer is lower than the DPS and thus can't trade).

You're basically throwing more RNG on top of the existing RNG which guild leaders do not want.

"it might very well be that at higher difficulty pugs's performance takes a huge hit compared to guild raiding."

Absolutely. Think about it this way -- if you join a PUG, you likely don't expect to wipe more than like one or two dozen times on a boss. Mythic guilds expect to wipe often 50+ or even 100+ times on fights. With a constantly shifting PUG you could probably expect wiping 300+ times, being generous, with new people and new composition all the time. It was expected that 10H *guilds* would wipe 300+ times on H Garrosh. I cannot imagine a PUG ever getting it.

99.9% of the people willing to wipe that much and put in that effort will just be in a mythic guild.

"What difference does it make if most will fail?"

See my comments about loot lockout abuse. It's not about the PUGs, it's about the rules you'd need to change which would cause major problems.

@Balkoth: this discussion is mostly offtopic. Maybe Blizzard had valid reasons to create the lockout system, and because of the lockout system you can't PuG anything but first boss (no way the same people who killed first will meet for the second). This case they could say: "to avoid X, Y and Z abuses we had to make restrictive lockout system, that makes PuG-ging impossible". Instead they told "PuGs are too bad for Mythic", which is a lie.

I wiped 94 before killing Imperator HC. Every time a new PuG was formed, the first try was the "kick bomb idiots and low DPS" wipe. These wipes would be prevented by raiding with the same guys. The rest were because we needed to improve. I didn't see that "I'm boosting idiots", the others performed the same level as I am. I'm simply not a world top player. So while you wouldn't imagine PuGs would do it, I just did it. And doesn't mind. This is the raiding content. What I mind is that I can't do it again on Mythic, despite I've earned my "attunement" the same way as everyone else.

"99.9% of the people willing to wipe that much and put in that effort will just be in a mythic guild." Wrong. Mythic guilds don't require effort. They require SCHEDULE. I am playing games 30+ hours a week. Probably more if we include blogging (about gaming). But I cannot promise that I'll be available every Monday, between 19:00 and 23:00. And this is exactly what Mythic guilds want: high attendance in fixed raid times.

PuG means that whenever I have time, I just queue up and raid. This is what I loved about it, and this is why I unsubscribed so quickly after I ran out of content. After having a kill with so many wipes, doing garrison cleaning just doesn't cut.

@Gevlon: "Instead they told "PuGs are too bad for Mythic", which is a lie."

It might be wrong, but I highly doubt that it's a lie. Blizzard explicitly stated as goal for Mythic to be hard content requiring coordination and dedication they don't believe is appropriate for pugs.

It might be that they undervalue pugs or overvalue Mythic's features, but this makes them wrong, not liars.

1. Guilds will abuse lockout systems if possible.2. Mythic is designed with these guilds in mind3. Therefore Mythic has very restrictive lockouts to prevent abuse4. Therefore Mythic is not PUG friendly.

I mean, that's Blizzard's first sentence:

"Mythic is a different concept from all other difficulties and it's not meant to be PUG friendly."

Isn't that the crux of your argument, that Blizzard is lying?

"Instead they told "PuGs are too bad for Mythic", which is a lie."

Now where did they say that? The only section that looks like it could possibly even be that is...

"Enabling this option would imply that this content should be doable by PUGs, and because it clearly isn't, it would only lead to frustration, complaints and nerf requests."

99%+ of PUGs aren't going to reasonably be able to do anything but Mythic Kargath (and only like 1-2% of PUGs will be able to even do that). PUG groups generally don't expect to wipe much -- your 94 wipes on H Imperator (across a bunch of groups, of course) is very much an outlier.

We already saw this frustration and complaints in SoO Mythic when that was allowed cross-realm and the only reasons tons of nerfs weren't called for is because it already got massively nerfed.

I mean, it really seems (and correct me if I'm wrong) that you're basically upset that Blizzard said "We don't think Mythic is reasonably doable by PUGs" rather than "We don't think Mythic is reasonably doable by 99.9% of PUGs."

Also, I play WoW (including raiding where I lead a 5/7M guild) for about 9-10 hours a week. Maybe a little more if I help some friends with normal/heroic, but I only raid 8-9 hours per week (at scheduled times, yes). But during those 8-9 hours (2 nights for 4ish hours) I promise I'm putting in a lot of effort and it requires a lot of perseverance.

"PuG means that whenever I have time, I just queue up and raid. This is what I loved about it, and this is why I unsubscribed so quickly after I ran out of content."

Understandable. I personally find it amusing that you're probably investing like 8-10 times the amount of time per boss compared to a decent guild, but hey, if your schedule is really that chaotic then maybe you can't commit to even 1-2 nights a week.

But the amount of people in your category (good enough to do Mythic, willing to wipe far more than necessary, but can't commit to even 1-2 nights a week) is astronomically small.

As in, you're the first person I've met in 8 years or so of WoW (stopped playing for WotLK) who would possibly fall into that category.

And changing the entire lockout/loot system and metagame is simply not worth it to make that microcosm happy.

@Balkoth: the part you forget is "skill". If you are at 5/7M, that's world top 1000 guild or top 0.2% within the playerbase.

I don't think I'm that good. I failed a lot on Imperator until I learned it. Actually I still cheat: I never stack on intermission, so if I get focused, I don't have to move. I think if we'd create 19 clones of me, we'd be at 2/7M.

So the problem is: finding a guild that has the same schedule and skill level. Surely there are guilds that play when I am. But they are either below me (5/7H, no thanks) or above me (5/7M, I'd be "that guy"). Now that isn't a trivial task.

Not that skill isn't important (I had to cut someone from our team yesterday who was consistently 5% behind compared to other players of the same spec (after factoring in ilvl differences) on Patchwerk and even more on hectic fights...but time also matters a lot. There are plenty of players worse than me who are 6/7M or even 7/7M -- raiding twice as much (or more) makes up for being, say, 5% worse or whatever.

Probably some players who don't raid at all (or are PvPers or whatever) who are better than me but less progressed too.

So maybe you're worse than me and would "only" be 2/7M at the moment -- you'd still be able to get 5/7M or 6/7M before the next tier (though obviously BRF throws a wrench in the works). I think you're also underestimating the benefits of playing with the same team and working on a boss fight with the same team -- the former means you understand each other and things you might do such as cooldowns much better and the latter means you learn much faster.

Trivial, no, but it might be easier than you think. Or, at least, it doesn't take much effort on your part to try. Just go to the guild recruitment forums and make a post outlining your situation. Say "I'm 7/7H, can only commit 1 night (or 2 nights or whatever) on these particular days at these times, looking for a mythic guild." Add in more about what you're looking for but that's the base.

Then you can sit back and watch, there's a very, very good chance guilds will respond to your post who will be interested in you. You probably don't even have to go out and actively search, though using WoWProgress, sorting by raids/week and progression, makes that pretty easy too.

P.S. Irrelevant to the discussion at hand, but I wanted to mention something. During Vanilla and BC I just played, only paid attention to the game, guild website, and realm forums. Quit for WotLK due to RL. Came back for Cata and got more involved in the "community" if you will. Really enjoyed reading your blog at the time, was fascinated by the Undergeared project (wish I could have joined in but US) and made a character to join the PUG guild that people tried to make in the US (which didn't really work out). We certainly disagree on some stuff but I still generally find what you say intriguing and it's interesting to see your play experience as its so vastly different from mine.